Every business expense needs justification; hence, any advertising campaign requires an evaluation of its efficiency. There are many tools available that help evaluate the results of a promotion, and one of them is call tracking.
Why is Call Tracking Needed?
Call tracking is a technology used to track customer calls. The service allows you to determine how many potential buyers each of the channels through which users learn about your company or product has attracted.
Potential customers can be attracted using various methods. Traffic sources can be both online and offline. If you provide the same phone number everywhere, choosing the most effective traffic channel and calculating its conversion will be very challenging. Managers would have to ask the customer where they saw the company’s contact information, which is time-consuming and might distract some clients from making a purchase.
Call tracking allows you to determine which traffic channel a potential customer came from, and in the case of internet advertising, even find out which search query led them to you. The service saves the lead’s number and records the conversation.
Call tracking helps businesses save on advertising budgets and efficiently allocate expenses.
With its help, you can:
- Identify which advertising channel attracts more potential customers;
- Check the effectiveness of advertising creatives and choose the best one;
- Determine the most effective keywords;
- Monitor the quality of work of the sales department and call center;
- Calculate the profitability of promotion on a specific platform.
How it Works
The operation of call tracking is unnoticeable to customers.
- A person calls a substituted phone number;
- The service registers the call source and logs it in the database;
- The call is then forwarded to the company’s main number, where the request is processed.
Calls from the substituted numbers of call tracking can be redirected to any landline or mobile number, as well as to an IP phone.
As a result, you receive information about the number of inquiries from each advertising channel, a database of potential customers’ contacts, and recordings of their conversations.
Types of Call Tracking
There are two main types of call tracking — static and dynamic. They differ in their depth of analysis and configuration features.
Static Call Tracking
With static call tracking, each advertising channel is assigned a unique substituted number. The service tracks from which channel the potential customer came and records their number in the database. Using static call tracking, you can learn that out of 40 calls received by the sales department in a day, 10 people responded to radio advertising, 20 clients saw the number on a billboard, and another 10 called from leaflets. Static call tracking is more suitable for offline advertising when there is no need to deeply analyze the customer’s journey.
Dynamic Call Tracking
This type of call tracking provides more information about traffic sources, assessing the effectiveness not only of each advertising channel but also of each ad and keyword. The service connects multiple substituted numbers to a single advertising channel. Thus, three users arriving at the site simultaneously may see three different phone numbers. With this technology, call tracking collects a vast amount of data about the customer’s journey.
Dynamic call tracking records:
- The source of the call (advertising channel, ad platform, specific advertisement, and keyword);
- User data (which browser and device they used, their location);
- Whether the potential customer had contacted the company before.
With dynamic call tracking, it’s possible to calculate conversion and cost per lead, identify advertising channels with the most solvent audience, abandon ineffective types of advertising, and select the most effective keywords for SEO promotion.
Choosing a Call Tracking System
You can choose a call tracking system for your business based on the following criteria:
- Availability of dynamic call tracking (not all companies can offer it);
- A large database of substituted numbers;
- Integration capabilities with other services (e.g., CRM);
- The ability to record conversations. It’s also essential to consider the cost of connection, user interface convenience, and geographic coverage.
Call tracking is an indispensable service for marketers and business owners. It prevents blind wastage of the advertising budget and helps determine the most effective promotion method.
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